Katie Piper: I had to stay positive despite the darkness after acid attack

Acid attack victim Katie Piper has revealed how positive thinking helped her regain her life after more than 150 operations.

Silver lining: Katie Piper has released a book with daily affirmations to encourage and inspire people (Picture: Ray Burmstan)

‘My dad told me: “You should appreciate the darkness because it’s the only time you can look up and see the stars,”’ says Katie Piper. ‘It’s one of my favourite affirmations.’

Katie Piper has had more darkness in her life than most. In 2008, the aspiring model and TV presenter started dating Daniel Lynch, a man she’d met on Facebook. Shortly into their relationship, he beat and raped her.

Days later, after repeatedly calling and texting her, he persuaded Katie to leave her flat to go to an internet café and read an email he had sent – on her way there, Lynch’s accomplice threw sulphuric acid in her face.

She was blinded in one eye, lost most of her nose and part of one ear. Her face had to be cut away. Katie wrote a note to her mother asking her to kill her. She spent seven weeks in hospital and had to wear a plastic pressure mask for 23 hours a day for the next two years.

But Katie recovered and now works as a TV presenter and for her burns charity The Katie Piper Foundation. She has also written Start Your Day With Katie, a collection of 365 daily affirmations. It seems unlikely that positive thinking can help someone overcome such horrific experiences but Katie credits her parents’ optimism and encouragement as a key factor in her recovery.

Slow progress: Katie Piper’s mother, Diane, took pictures of her daughter throughout her long recovery (Picture: Katie Piper)

‘They made a conscious decision to be as positive as they could be when I was in hospital. I’m sure they didn’t feel like that on the inside but it helped all of us to tell each other I was going to get better,’ says Katie.

The family began to treat the difficult days as milestones they could put behind them. ‘The court case was scary but on the last day I thought: “I’ll never have to do that again and if I’ve gone through that I can get through the skin graft on Monday.”’ Her attackers each received a life sentence.

Katie’s mother Diane took photographs of her daughter after her early operations and then every two weeks afterwards. This pictorial account helped Katie keep focused on the slow progress she was making. ‘Other people may have been shocked by my appearance but the pictures showed how far I’d come on. It’s not a race, it’s my recovery and I’m not going to compare myself to the rest of the world.’

Katie has had more than 150 operations – she’s lost count of the precise number – and two more are coming up. The first is to rebuild her septum, the second is on her eye. An operation last year used stem cells to restore a small amount of vision in her damaged eye – the cornea was destroyed in the attack – and she can now distinguish between light and dark, see shapes and read ‘the big A on the eye chart’. The forthcoming operation is intended to improve her vision.

Typically, Katie has chosen to view the huge number of operations she’s undergone as positively as possible: ‘I look at it like I’m having an operation that would cost thousands in America – so I’m lucky we have the NHS in this country. And how amazing that science has progressed since Simon Weston’s day, when there wasn’t the same kind of treatment for burns injuries.’

Documenting her operations in a TV programme was a cathartic experience and helped prevent people asking awkward questions and staring. ‘If you saw the programme you didn’t need to ask, “What happened to her?”’ she says.

The documentary My Beautiful Face and follow-up series My Beautiful Friends, in which she met people with facial disfigurements, were so popular Channel 4 have signed her up to present other factual programmes. She’s hoping that appearing on shows that aren’t about disfigurement will help normalise the perception of burns survivors among the public.

A recent appearance on reality show Hotel GB suggests Katie has a long way to go before her message is taken on board by everyone. ‘I got tweets saying, “Oh my God, you’ve had a dreadful face lift,”’ she says. ‘Which is maybe a backhanded compliment if you’ve had your whole face melted and rebuilt.’

‘Even if someone has chosen to have plastic surgery, it’s no one’s place to comment on it – you don’t know their situation, they might have had a stroke. Any number of things could have happened to them. I don’t understand why a grown adult would say that to someone. It’s really immature.’

Katie recently celebrated her 29th birthday. She spent the day giving a lecture to a group of physiotherapists as part of her foundation work, then went to see the Michael Jackson The Immortal World Tour at London’s 02 Arena with her boyfriend. It’s a big achievement since she was too scared to leave the house for months after coming out of hospital. ‘The injuries were difficult but nothing that would break me. The psychological aspect of going out in public, having been attacked, and what people’s reactions would be was the biggest challenge.’

That was four years ago. She’s since become a regular at red carpet events, made an appearance last week at Ascot, and has won awards for not only surviving her ordeal but for inspiring others with the help she gives to burns survivors. ‘Yes, some people have made unkind comments to me on the street but I’ve been through worse. I’ve had to fight so hard for my life, why would I not live it because of a stranger’s passing comment? That can’t affect me.’

Start Your Day With Katie is out now published by Quercus. Katie is a judge at Cosmopolitan magazine’s Ultimate Women Awards held tonight (Oct 30) at the V&A.

‘Believe in yourself’Katie explains how positive affirmations can help get you through your working day… Reframe your thoughts to look at a situation more positively. You become your thoughts, so why be your own worst enemy? If you walk around thinking ‘I’m not capable of doing this job’, or ‘I’m stupid’, that’s what your colleagues will come to believe because you’ve already formed that opinion. Beware of energy vampires. Negative people are less likely to achieve things and can bring you down. Going into work with a negative attitude will rub off on your colleagues and that will become the vibe in the office. If you’re positive, people will respond to you better, you will achieve more and life is generally more enjoyable. If you don’t believe the positive things you’re telling yourself, that you’re capable and productive, then fake it until you make it. Your positive affirmations will eventually become reality. If you say you can’t do something, you won’t.